The Law Enforcement Industrial Complex
Friday 25 November 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized
The Law Enforcement and Military Industrial Complexes, morphed. Wired:
An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.
The sprawling contract, ostensibly designed to stop drug-funded terrorism, seeks security firms for missions like “train[ing] Azerbaijan Naval Commandos.” Other tasks include providing Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopter training “for crew members of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.” Still others involve building “anti-terrorism/force protection enhancements” for the Pakistani border force in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.
The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.
CNTPO quietly solicited an umbrella contract for all the security services listed above — and many, many more — on Nov. 9. It will begin handing out the contract’s cash by August. And there is a lot of cash to disburse.
The ceiling for the “operations, logistics and minor construction” tasks within CNTPO’s contract is $950 million. Training foreign forces tops out at $975 million. “Information” tasks yield $875 million. The vague “program and program support” brings another $240 million.
That puts CNTPO in a rare category. By disbursing at least $3 billion — likely more, since the contract awards come with up to three yearlong re-ups — the office is among the most lucrative sources of cash for private security contractors. The largest, from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, doles out a $10 billion, five-year deal known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract.
CNTPO is “essentially planning on outsourcing a global counternarcotics and counterterrorism program over the next several years,” says Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, “and it’s willing to spend billions to do so.”
For the vast majority of people who’ve never heard of CNTPO, the organization answers to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict Directorate, within the Counternarcotics and Global Threats portfolio. It’s tucked away so deep, bureaucratically speaking, that it doesn’t actually have an office at the Pentagon.
The War on Drugs is not about helping people or curbing the flow of illegal drugs, but about money and power. We’ve created a law enforcement industrial complex in which an entire industry, all completely funded by our tax dollars, is dependent on drugs being illegal. Massive, militarized police departments where over 1/2 of all arrests annually are for drug use and over 150 paramilitary SWAT raids are performed daily, a massive corrections infrastructure that houses the world’s largest number of prisoners, run by corrupts prison guard unions that exist only to suck on the public teat, mercenaries feeding off of public dollars, quasi-secret defense programs that run billions of dollars through its “office”, that doesn’t even have an office. The drug war a major part of the goliath, and the only reason that drug law liberalization won’t even be considered by our betters.
The war on drugs exists solely because too much government depends on drugs being illegal. It’s a jobs program. If you are for the continuance on the war on drugs, you are in full support of big government and any pretense you have in being a small government person is no more than word play.
2011-11-25 » madlibertarianguy